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The Relentless Retreat: God in the Age of Science.

(Review essay - to appear in Reports of the National Center for Science Education)

The Relentless Retreat: God in the Age of Science.

Is there anything more to be said about the
conflict between science and religion? Numerous peace efforts have tried to
reconcile both parties, but their territorial disputes refuse to settle down.
In Religion and the Sciences of Origins,
philosopher and Christian apologist Kelly James Clark focuses on questions
about origins (of life, the universe and everything), one notable area where
the “religious rubber meets the science road” (p. 7). After sketching the
possible models for thinking about science and religion as he sees them (Conflict,
Separation and Integration), Clark discusses a number of episodes in the
history of science – the scientific revolution, the Galileo affair, the
reception of Darwin’s theory – and moves on to some miscellaneous topics in the
second half: fine-tuning arguments, the salutary effect of religion on society,
dualism and the existence of the soul, the foundations of morality, free will,
and science/religion in Judaism and Islam. Borrowing the medieval metaphor of the
Doctrine of the Two Books, Clarke maintains that there is no genuine conflict
between science (The Book of Nature) and monotheistic religion (The Book of
Scripture). Religious believers need not fear the discoveries of science, as these
do not jeopardize their faith. The study of either Book can only enrich one’s
understanding of the other. Religion and
the Sciences of Origins follows an endless spate of books on science and
religion, most of them purporting to show that the twain can meet and live in
harmony (see for example recent works by Alvin Plantinga, Alister McGrath, Michael
Ruse, John Haught, Kenneth Miller). Clarke’s contribution, which is accessible
for a lay audience and requires no special background, continues that theme.

The Conflict Thesis

In this essay, I will focus on Clark’s central
argument about the relationship between science and religion: that the conflict
view is hugely overblown, a fantasy of militant atheists and other culture
warriors, and that both science and religion can co-exist in peaceful harmony,
provided they stay on their respective turf.

The root of the conflict view, according to
Clark, is the thesis, defended by ‘new atheists’ such as Richard Dawkins, Jerry
Coyne, and Victor Stenger, that God can be regarded as a scientific hypothesis
that has failed to garner empirical support, or has even been decisively
refuted. Many phenomena that were previously attributed to divine intervention,
or so defenders of the conflict view argue, are now understood in terms of perfectly
natural processes. For Clark, this view is
totally misguided: God is a person, and religious faith is more like belief in
the existence of other minds, something that people directly intuit rather than
infer from empirical data (readers familiar with Reformed epistemology will
recognize Alvin Plantinga’s account about “properly basic belief”).Clark’s claim
that “God is not a scientific hypothesis,” however, plays on an equivocation.
To be sure, the God ‘hypothesis’ does not look much like, say, the nebular
hypothesis of the formation of the solar system. It did not arise from careful
empirical investigation of nature, and religious believers who endorse such
beliefs do not do so tentatively and after carefully examining the available
evidence. A less polite way of saying this is that believers tend to be
intransigent and dogmatic. In that sense, indeed, God is not a scientific
hypothesis. But all that is irrelevant for the conflict view: belief in a
supernatural Creator amounts to a
scientific hypothesis in the sense that it has testable empirical consequences,
is amenable to scientific investigation, and would make a genuine difference
for science if true (Fishman 2009). That is precisely the heart of the conflict
thesis: because it makes factual claims about reality, religion encroaches on
the domain of science and is vying for the same explanatory domain, even if
does not remotely look like science. To think that God is “not on the
scientific radar” (p. 6), as Clark does, just
because theism did not emerge as a result of the hypothetico-deductive method,
is a category mistake.

What about all the different ways in which
science has contradicted religious Scriptures? “The Bible is not a textbook of
science,” according to Clark, and was never
meant to be taken literally. For Clark,
apparently taking the divine origin of the Bible at face value (p. 77), God had
no choice but to stoop down to the intellectual level of his creatures when he
chose to reveal himself to them. He had to speak in their own language. After
all, if God had simply dictated the true mathematical description of the cosmos
(p. 71), his Chosen People would have been dumbfounded. It is almost too
obvious to remark that this is a false dilemma. If I were God, here is how I
would start Genesis: “In the beginning the world burst forth from a huge
explosion, and the light was so seething hot that nothing could survive.” As
for the place of the Earth in the universe, surely even illiterate goat herders
could understand something like this: “Behold, the Earth under your feet is round
like a sphere, and with every turn of the seasons it traces a path round the
Sun, in the shape of an outstretched circle. And the Sun is like a burning hot
furnace and far away from the earth, but the moon is much closer.”[1] At any rate, this
makes a lot more sense than most of the stuff from the Book of Revelation. A
divine Revelation does not need to be stuffed with equations to be consistent with the scientific facts.

Clark is fair in at least one regard: in reconciling
science and religion, he provides equal disservice to both. The most important
distortion of science in this book, which is unfortunately also promulgated by
high-profile scientific organizations such as the NCSE and the AAAS, is that
science is by its very nature restricted to natural causes and explanations,
and must remain studiously neutral on questions about the supernatural. God can
never fail as a scientific
hypothesis, or so the doctrine of methodological
naturalism claims, because he never entered the scientific arena in the
first place. He may or may not exist, but science has no say on the matter. I
think this is a politically convenient fiction, which does not survive
philosophical scrutiny and historical analysis (Edis 1998; Boudry, Blancke
et al. 2010; Fishman and Boudry 2013). It has also backfired, because it creates the
impression that science has unfairly excluded God (see the ID propaganda movie Expelled) from serious consideration.
The Intelligent Design (ID) folks had a field day with that one.

The doctrine of “methodological naturalism” is just
one among several straitjackets that Clarke wants to force science in. In his
view, science also assumes the
non-existence of immaterial entities, it rules out personal (agential)
explanations from consideration (archaeologists would be surprised), it presupposes
the regularity of natural laws, it must favor simple theories over more complex
ones, and it is inconceivable without the a
priori assumption of the intelligibility of nature. But science does not
adopt such inviolable methodological strictures from the outset. It is like
Otto Neurath’s ship, being built and reconstructed along the way, out in the
open sea. Indeed, Clark gets the story exactly
backward: for example, why would scientists need to presuppose the regularity of nature, instead of adopting it as a
working hypothesis that can be checked every time we consult nature (Fishman and Boudry 2013)? Is the preference for simplicity really just a
quirk of scientists, an irreducible assumption, or could there be good probabilistic
and evidential reasons for it (e.g. Forster and Sober 1994; Fishman and Boudry 2013)? Contra Clark, science does not carry an a
priori bias against personal (agential) explanations for phenomena. Rather, as
a result of centuries of scientific investigation, earlier animistic, anthropomorphic,
and teleological views have gradually been superseded by more parsimonious and
unifying impersonal explanations. Putting the cart before the horse here
quickly leads to absurdities. Why, for example, don’t we find scientists
positing “teeny tiny elves” to account for the behavior of subatomic particles?
For Clark, this is because of a scientific “prejudice … against persons as the
causes of material reality” and a “value commitment to natural causes” (p. 18).[2] In other words, if
it were not for materialist “prejudice”, we could have had little elves
reigning over the microscopic realm.

History of warfare

This book contains many confident assertions
that the received knowledge on the clashes between science and religion is
completely wrong. Andrew Dickson White’s monumental A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom,
which contains literally hundreds of examples of theology forestalling
scientific progress, is brushed aside as “deeply flawed” (p. 24), but we never
learn exactly why. Perhaps we should have a look at one of the most famous
episodes in this warfare, which Clark discusses at some length: Galileo’s
quarrel with the Inquisition. The received story of the scientific hero being
persecuted for heresy, as summarized by Clark, is “nearly completely false” (p.
46). Why? For starters, according to Clark, because Galileo himself was guilty
of “arrogance” and impertinent “sarcasm” (p. 49) in his Dialogues, and because he had dared to step on the Pope’s toes.
Finally, his “timing was poor” (p. 51). Galileo, it should be borne in mind,
had the foolhardy idea of being born in the aftermath of the Protestant
Reformation, when the Catholic Church had grown anxious about dissident views.
Clark comes close to condoning the Inquisition and blaming Galileo for his
temerity. The Church, you see, was genuinely concerned with the “eternal
destiny” of its flock, which they would not allow philosophical “mavericks”
like Galileo to jeopardize. “A kinder and gentler Galileo might have succeeded
where the actual Galileo failed” (p. 51). More plausibly, such a gentler soul
would have shut up about heliocentrism in the first place, as the Inquisition,
who had burned Giordano Bruno at the stake for his heretical views a mere 16
years ago, was pressuring him to do. In Clark’s view, just because someone was
condemned with heresy by the Holy Inquisition for denying the literal truth of
Scripture, and was being threatened with torture in the process, does not mean
that there was a conflict between science and religion. It all boiled down to a
“lack of scientific evidence” (p. 52). In Clark’s own words: “The conflict, and
there surely was one, was more science versus science than science versus
religion.” From reading Clark, you would almost believe that the Holy
Inquisition was an early and exemplary model of academic peer review.

The Doctrine of the Two Books

Many of the pioneers of the Scientific
Revolution, as Clark rightly points out, were devoutly religious men. These
scientists reconciled their faith with their investigations of nature by
upholding the Doctrine of the Two Books, to which Clark devotes considerable
attention. According to this doctrine, famously defended by Francis Bacon, Truth
can never contradict Truth, so if The Book of Nature seemed to be at odds with
Scripture, we should blame our limited understanding of Scripture. But does
this show that science and religion can live in harmony? Francis Bacon, along
with luminaries such as Newton and Boyle, were confident that investigations of
the natural world would leave the basic tenets of the Bible intact. Perhaps
some specific interpretation of the Bible would need to be abandoned, but that
was all for the greater glory of God. Little did these devout religious men
expect that their intellectual descendants – modern scientists – eventually
were to give up the young age of the Earth, the Flood, the miracle stories, the
existence of Adam and Eve, the garden of Eden, the special creation of humans,
the virgin birth, the Resurrection of Jesus, and just about every other factual
tenet of Christianity. If they had foreseen what the Book of Nature had in
store for them, and how it would tear the other Book to shreds, they might have
paused before opening that Pandora’s box.

The Doctrine of the Two Books foreboded trouble
from the very start, because it could only accommodate changes in one
direction: from Nature to Scripture, never the other way around. The
infallibility of Scripture, while still professed in principle, would
eventually be reduced to a paper tiger. In Clark’s own defense of the Doctrine
of the Two Books (pp. 95-96), the message of Scripture seems to be whatever is
left standing after the latest scientific developments, with the rest demoted
to the status of metaphor and allegory. That raises the question: is there a
single proposition in the Bible that Clark considers non-negotiable? And if so,
on what basis? Perhaps Jesus never existed in the first place. If Adam was just
a metaphor, why not his successor, the Second Adam?

The Retreat of Religion

Whenever scientific knowledge advances, religion is
forced to retreat. The current position occupied by many theologians who reject
creationism and Intelligent Design is called ‘theistic evolutionism’: evolution
by natural selection has occurred, but God was somehow keeping evolution on
track, for example by fiddling with “random” mutations, conveniently ensuring
that such interventions escape his creatures’ scientific efforts to detect them.
Clarke, although it is hard to pin him down, seems to be favorable to this
view: “God could ensure … that mutations occur (through natural processes) as
needed” (p. 107). He also toys with various other models for allowing divine creativity
even if mutations are “random” in the strong sense of being unpredictable. Never
mind that there is not a scintilla of evidence for this directionality (as
there could be), or for some sort of “Riverboat Gambler” God behind the scenes
(p. 110).What remains then of the Book of Scripture, after
Clark’s reconciliation with the Book of Nature? Well, the phrase “Let there be
light” in Genesis can still be interpreted, through a wild stretch of
imagination, as God stooping down to humanity to inform us about Big Bang
cosmology. “Intelligent design,” a modern-day heir of natural theology, may be discredited
in the eyes of most theologians, but cosmology may still leave a number of gaps
in the fabric of the cosmos for God to fill up. According to the ‘fine tuning’
arguments that are currently in vogue, the fundamental physical constants in
our universe seem to lie within a very narrow range, outside of which the
cosmos would not be conducive to the formation of matter and solar systems, let
alone be hospitable to intelligent life. Surely this is a sign of God’s
providence. However, even if we grant that life is viable only within a certain
range of physical values, which is a premature conclusion at this point, there
are plenty of natural explanations on offer for this appearance of fine-tuning (Carroll 2012). In the multiverse model arising from string theory, for example, the
constants of nature vary from one place to the other, and the existence of
certain life-conducive regions is a matter of sheer happenstance. Clark is
aware of this possibility, and although he spends a whole chapter on
fine-tuning arguments for the existence of God, at the same time he is already
hedging his bets and anticipating the next retreat: if one of the multiverse
models of the cosmos should be borne out, and fine-tuning arguments would go
out of the window, this, too, would count in favor of theism: “God in his
goodness may indeed have created everything – every possible kind of thing in
the universe. … The multiverse might be the ultimate expression of divine
goodness and creativity.” (p. 205). So either God, in his loving providence,
has created one universe carefully tailored for life, or in his infinite
profligacy, has created a whole plethora of worlds, the finely-tuned and the
messed-up ones alike. Either way, praise be unto Him! This “Heads I win, Tails
you lose” approach to theology betrays a desperation to maintain a cherished
belief at any cost, regardless of the evidence. Note also that by invoking the
fine-tuning argument, Clark is tacitly conceding that evidence is in fact relevant to the God question
– thereby undermining his claim that God is not a scientific hypothesis.

In science, this kind of reasoning would be met
with ridicule, but for theology, being ”another way of knowing”, different
rules seem to apply. Towards the end of his book, Clark discusses one type of
multiverse model, in which there is a succession of expanding and contracting
universes, with the constants of nature being shuffled every time a collapsing
universe turns into a freshly exploding one. Following an argument of Roger
Penrose, Clark argues that the second law of thermodynamics (the inexorable
rise of entropy in a closed system) would prevent life from arising in such a
multiverse. After a few rounds of banging and squeezing, after all, the usable
energy (with low entropy) of such a multiverse would be depleted, leaving too
little time and opportunity for the right physical conditions for life to arise
by chance. But what about the resurrection of the dead, a prospect which Clarke
apparently takes serious (p. 177-178)? Wouldn’t that be the most massive
violation of the law of increasing entropy imaginable? Ah, but of course God
can do whatever he likes, and he is not accountable to such trifles as the laws
of thermodynamics. Presumably he has an inexhaustible supply of usable energy,
or infinite time and patience. As a mere mortal, my patience with this kind of
apologetic nonsense is limited.

[1] There are several scientifically sanitized
versions of Genesis around, see for example The
Newer, More English Version by Tom Carver. Or the film clip “I Know More
Than God”, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qymoktf0wY#t=14

[2] You can see Clark getting uncomfortable with
his own conclusion in the remainder of the quote: “Prejudice”, he writes, is
actually just a form of “prejudgment, which is not always bad, certainly not in
the ruling out of tiny elf theory”. If there are such good reasons, however,
why talk about “prejudice”? In any case, what kind of reasons would Clark
adduce? And why would they apply to elves but not to God?

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Comments

Anonymous said…

Boy, this stuff just doesn't seem that complicated, nor worthy of all this talk. First, truth and factual statements, by definition, must predict measurable events in the future. Any other statements are opinions.

Statements that claim the existence of things that do not exist, and for which there is no evidence, are simple lies. Statements of belief in magical things are opinions and no more true or false then statements of preference. Arguing against magical/nonsensical statements is nonsensical as well. Just rhetorical wordplay.

Now, philosophers are paid to defend the naive realism of everyday language and intuition, so the above wordplay is fine but meaningless and of little value. Should philosophers be paid, attention mainly, to argue against the tooth fairy or voodoo?

Finally, with the growing medical evidence against any sort of subjective/solipsistic/conscious-word based control of behaviors - beliefs are likely also irrelevant to behavior, so why bother about beliefs? Ho hum...

There is an often occuring conflict between science and non-scientific ideas. Science might directly contradict my intuitions, or my armchair-science and of course one's religious beliefs. Besides a direct contradiction it can also lead to defeaters or implausibilities.And there is an easy explaination for such conflicts: Science has other epistemic mechanisms to form assumptions about and related to the same fields the non-scientific assumptions are about.

Do you think, that's all to say about the nature of the conflict between science and religion, or is there more?